Twenty one experts drawn from Regional and Federal Agricultural Growth Programme (AGP) offices, Office of Agriculture, Cooperative Promotion Agency and NGOs participated in a three day workshop organized to finalize the draft a “Gender Guideline” prepared by the Gender Unit of the Federal AGP office. The objective of the workshop was to give input on proposed checklists, tasks and gender specific indicators before circulating the guideline for use by gender specialists, extension workers and front line agricultural development agents involved in the AGP.

The workshop was held from June 21-23, 2012 in Debrezeit Town. Keberu Belayneh, the Federal AGP coordinator officially opened the workshop. Zertihun Seyoum, director of Women and Youth Affairs of the federal ministry attended the official opening.

Workshop participants (13 men and 8 women) were drawn from the four AGP regions: Tigray, Amhara, Oromia and SNNP to discuss the draft guideline. The workshop was facilitated by Ephrem Tessema, gender consultant of IPMS together with the gender specialist from Federal AGP Coordination Office.

In her closing speech, Tsehaynesh Kidane, Federal AGP Gender Specialist, indicated the need for collaboration among AGP, ILRI/IPMS, ACDI/VOCA and other line ministries on gender and value chain development in order to meet AGP’s targets.

During the workshop, offline copies of the Ethiopian Agricultural Portal (EAP) were distributed. Apart from a variety of reading and reference materials, the offline version contains a number of informative resources on gender in market led agricultural development.

Contributed by: Ephrem Tessema (IPMS)